AMD takes the video card war to an appalling new low

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When it comes to most things technology-related, I’m generally a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy. I understand that competition in the marketplace can be fierce and, as I’ve written about here a number of times in the past, I usually think that’s a good thing. It forces companies to offer better products than they might otherwise, at lower prices than they’d probably dare if the threat of losing millions (billions?) of dollars wasn’t breathing down their necks. So, in almost every situation, I say to the companies who want to duel each other to the death for customers’ money and allegiance: Bring it on.

Not long after heading home from work, I received an email from one of AMD’s representatives with a new BIOS attached for flashing onto the reference-model Radeon HD 7950 I’d been sent last year. “Similar to the changes made to the HD 7970 GHz edition,” the email read, “we’ve added extra features, performance, and general goodness to the original AMD Radeon HD 7950 via this BIOS change. The engine clock has now been increased to 850MHz base/925MHz boost state.”

So far, so good, right? Well, sort of. I was already throwing things at this point because… uh… well, I don’t think I’m allowed to say why, exactly. But suffice it to say that if I had been spending the last week under the impression that the 7950 could properly be compared to a certain other card, then this would obviously change everything. And if this were occurring at pretty much the last possible moment, then of course that wouldn’t make me happy. Not that I’m saying that was why, mind you, it’s simply one possibility.

The real outrage came next, when my contact said not only that board partners are planning to put out products using the new specs later this week or next week, but that this new BIOS “is not guaranteed to work with all the 7950 boards in the field.”

In other words, I get the speed increases now because I’m a member of the technology media. But you? You don’t. And, depending on which 7950 you own, you might not ever get them.

This is, to put it nicely, appalling.

I’m used to both AMD and Nvidia fiddling around so much with prices in the days leading up to video card launches that virtuosic violinists capable of playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” at full speed stand would stare in slack-jawed bewilderment. But, ultimately, when companies drop prices on preexisting products, whenever it happens and for whatever reason it happens, everyone benefits. If you already own the card that’s becoming less expensive, your money is gone, true, but you’ve been using the card — hopefully happily — for months already. And the card doesn’t get worse merely because its price gets better.

But this move is a slap in the face to a lot of different people. Everyone buying a card from here on out will get better performance that can obviously be implemented by nothing more than a BIOS tweak, but the owners of current cards can’t be assured their cards will be able to get it — meaning they spent their money for what AMD has now made a substandard product. For at least the next few weeks, it will be all but impossible for those shopping for video cards to tell whether any given model in the market uses the improved BIOS — if they happen to make the wrong choice, they lose out despite having made no specific mistake. Worse yet, Hardware Canucks is reporting that improperly flashing the BIOS on a 7950 from any of several major board partners could void the card’s warranty — yet another unnecessary annoyance people should not have to endure just because they want their card to be as good as AMD knows it can be.

Improving performance by way of a driver update is one thing: Anyone can download and install a new driver and instantly see better frame rates in games. This move is creating two entirely separate classes of users: those who, for some undefinable reason, deserve the faster speed, and those who don’t. No matter how many ways I puzzle this out in my head, I can’t see how this is supposed to foster any good will within AMD’s userbase, let alone draw customers away from Nvidia. This goes beyond the one-upmanship we’ve seen on the video card battlefield before. It’s not merely changing the rules. It’s almost instituting anarchy.

Even more than AMD’s last move of this nature, unveiling the aforementioned 7970 GHz Edition in such a way as to steal the thunder of Nvidia’s own accomplishments reconfiguring its line with its impressively priced GTX 670, this reeks of desperation, not doing the right thing for people who buy (let alone already own) the card. It almost doesn’t matter whether the “new” 7950 is good or not. It probably will be, in fact — AMD puts out consistently good hardware, after all, and things probably won’t be different this time. But if not everyone can get it, if not everyone can use it, and if not everyone can benefit from it, does it matter? Why didn’t AMD just go the traditional route and lower the price to undercut any (theoretical) new Nvidia release? Or just sit tight for a couple of months and make the obviously upcoming 8000-series cards that much better? Or do both? These aren’t extreme courses of action.

What AMD ended up doing, however, is. At this point, I’m not planning to redo a week of work in the next couple of days merely to satisfy one company’s need for one more day’s worth of headlines — especially when so many consumers are going to be left in the lurch. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to get to it at some point, because this move will obviously reshape the landscape, and people need to know what cards are out there and what they’re capable of. I’d even like to believe that, in the end, the hassle this will cause thousands of people (if not more) will be worth it. But right now I’m not convinced that there’s not a cleaner, more respectful way to get to the same destination.

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